How to Avoid Population Overshoot and Collapse

Manipulating psychological adaptations to help to prevent ecological overshoot.

"All species expand as much as resources allow and predators, parasites, and physical conditions permit. When a species is introduced into a new habitat with abundant resources that accumulated before its arrival, the population expands rapidly until all the resources are used up."- David Price, Energy and Human Evolution

Life scientists are aware of the concept of ecological "carrying capacity" (the maximum population that can be supported by the environment) and Malthus' application of these ideas to human populations. Malthus wrote:

"It is an obvious truth, which has been taken notice of by many writers, that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence; but no writer that the Author recollects has inquired particularly into the means by which this level is effected..." -- Thomas Malthus, 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population

Often, there is a cyclical relationship between the populations of predators and their prey. This keeps the populations of both species in check.

About 20 years after they were first introduced, the reindeer had overshot the food carrying capacity of the island, and there was a sudden, massive die-off. About 99% of the reindeer died of starvation.

As shown in the graph below, this is an example of a general phenomenon. All species suffer population collapse or species extinction if they overshoot and degrade the carrying capacity of their ecology.

This is also the fate that awaits bacteria growing in a Petri dish, as you might remember from your high school biology course. Imagine a Petri dish with enough nutrients to support a growing bacteria culture until the dish is completely full of them. One bacterium is placed inside the dish at 11:00am, and the population of bacteria doubles every minute -- such that the Petri dish will be full by noon.

At what time will the Petri dish be half full of bacteria?

Most people reply incorrectly that the Petri dish will be half full at 11:30am, because we are more familiar with linear, rather than with exponential, rates of growth. The correct answer is 11:59am -- which seems rather unintuitive. However, because the rate of growth is exponential (doubling every minute) the time at which the Petri dish is half full is 11:59am. With just one more doubling, in the next minute, the Petri dish is completely full, at noon.

Below is another example of a population overshoot and collapse scenario. This is the population graph of yeast cells in a 10% sugar solution. Note that the yeast population first explodes exponentially, and is then followed by population die-off as the finite nutrients are exhausted and their own waste products pollute their environment.

This is how yeast turns grape juice into wine. The next time you say "cheers" over a glass of wine, remember that you are drinking the waste products (alcohol) of a collapsed yeast colony with poor ecological management skills!

Anyone who perceives a linear rate of growth, but who is actually up against an exponential rate of growth, is likely to be very surprised at how the end comes very quickly and seemingly out of nowhere. They will be completely blindsided.

For more information about the dangers of exponential growth, I highly recommend the video Arithmetic, Population and Energy, byProf. Albert Bartlett. The key point to remember about Professor Bartlett's lecture: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

Notice how human population has also been on an exponential trend:

Are we humans smarter than yeast? Or will the graphic above of our population follow the overshoot and collapse graphic of the yeast? Unlike yeast, do we have any evolved psychological adaptations to help us to identify and avoid ecological overshoot?

The fate of humans on Easter Island may help to provide an answer. When the first humans arrived on the island, there were abundant resources to support the small population. Just like the yeast and the reindeer, the human population increased dramatically. There were no predators to cull the population. The human population continued to grow until it eventually overshot the island carrying capacity. After overshoot, most of the population starved. Apparently, they even turned on each other, sometimes resorting to cannibalism.

Human ecological exceptionalism?

It will be a race toward either paradise or oblivion, right to the last moment. -- Buckminster Fuller

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. -- H.G. Wells, The Outline of History

At this point, many people refer to human exceptionalism. Of course we are smarter than yeast or reindeer, and our scientific advances and our technology will save us from ecological overshoot. We can expand the carrying capacity of the Earth.

Raymond Kurzweil has argued in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near that scientific knowledge, like populations, also grows exponentially. He believes that this will allow us to expand the Earth's ecological carrying capacity, cure disease and aging, and solve problems of energy depletion. He is confident that technology will help us prevent ecological overshoot and population collapse.

So, we have two opposing, exponentially increasing trends. One exponential trend leads to ecological overshoot and collapse; the other trend could lead to scientific/technological solutions to these problems. Which will arrive first? Ecological overshoot and collapse (Malthus), or a "techno-fix" (Kurzweil)? No one knows. But, we probably won't have to wait long to find out. One of these two scenarios will likely occur within the next several decades. But, which one? Generally it is healthy to be optimistic, but optimism can be deadly if it produces a Pollyannaish denial of real problems. We should not ignore ecological problems by assuming "someone else" will take care of it, or that "the free market" or "technological breakthroughs" will always come to the rescue in time. Solutions may not come in time, and we may get quite a rude Malthusian smack down later. To avoid this, one problem we must face is how to make the transition from our finite, depleting oil resources to renewable energy. Technological civilization depends on cheap, abundant energy.

Peak oil as an example of human ecological overshoot.

There is no substitute for energy. The whole edifice of modern society is built upon it. It is not "just another commodity" but the precondition of all commodities, a basic factor equal with air, water and earth. -- E. F. Schumacher (1973)

We know that we cannot sustain a future powered by a fuel that is rapidly disappearing. ...breaking our oil addiction is one of the greatest challenges our generation will ever face. ...This will not be easy. -- Barack Obama, August 4, 2008

One example of resource depletion is the gradual depletion of fossil fuels, especially oil. The amount of oil produced by a particular oil field, or a region, shows a regular pattern: first oil production increases, then it reaches a peak, and, finally, as the oil field begins to dry up, oil production starts to decline. World "peak oil" is when world oil production peaks, and then starts an inexorable decline as oil fields start to dry up. Many experts believe that world oil production has already peaked, or that it will occur within the next few years. This presents us with a problem: as of now, no combination of renewable energy sources can scale up quickly enough, or provide anywhere near the energy equivalent of oil. We can anticipate that the world is about to enter a severe, worldwide energy shortage. Since food production is so dependent on energy production, following an energy famine will be a food famine. Many poor people, especially in developing countries, will literally starve to death as oil energy depletes.

Unless scientists discover some energy breakthrough "miracle" that can provide scalable and energy dense renewable energy, the predictions made in the graphs below paint some very grim scenarios. As you review these graphs, keep in mind that these nightmares are not in some distant future. They may arrive in less than one or two decades from now.

Here is a brief video of the history of human energy consumption, and the energy challenges we will soon be facing.

General human ecological overshoot

The 1972 book Limits to Growth also made some pretty frightening predictions back in 1972, as did the follow-up book in 2004 Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update.Using computer simulations, they predicted a world peak population around mid-century, followed by population decline.

Given that these predictions are now approaching 40 years old, how accurate were they? Are they still on track today?

In an article published in Science titled "Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil," Hall and Day noted that "the values predicted by the limits-to-growth model and actual data for 2008 are very close." These findings are consistent with another study titled "A Comparison of the Limits of Growth with Thirty Years of Reality" which concluded: "The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features... [of the Limits to Growth] 'standard run' scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st Century." To prevent this scenario, the Limits to Growth authors suggested that we must achieve ecological sustainability by 2022 to avoid serious ecological overshoot and population collapse.

Can humans be "smarter than yeast?" Can we be the only species that can successfully anticipate and avoid ecological overshoot and collapse? Issues of sustainability are psychological problems. Are we sufficiently psychologically sophisticated to manage our own collective behavior to achieve sustainability on a finite planet?

One sobering answer provided by evolutionary psychology is that we, like all other species, have no evolved psychological adaptations designed specifically to perceive, anticipate and avoid ecological overshoot. In fact, we have just the opposite.

One problem is that inclusive fitness, the "designer" of psychological adaptations, is always relative to others; it is not absolute. That is, nature doesn't "say," "Have two kids (or help 4 full sibs), and then you can stop. Good job! You did your genetic duty, you avoided contributing to ecological overshoot, and you may pass along now..." Instead, nature "says" (relative inclusive fitness): "Out-reproduce your competitors. Your competitors are all of the genes in your species' gene pool that you do not share. If the average inclusive fitness score is four, then you go for five... "In other words, our psychological adaptations are designed to not just "keep up with the Joneses" but to "do better than the Joneses." This is in whatever means that may have generally helped to increase inclusive fitness, such as status, conspicuous consumption, and resource acquisition and control.

If we are to have a fighting chance to be "smarter than yeast," we have to out-smart our own psychological adaptations; we have to "fool Mother Nature." Garrett Harden recognized that the problem of ecological overshoot is the tragedy of the commons writ large. He suggested that the way to solve the tragedy of the commons was "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected." That is, we must consent, collectively, to use our knowledge of our psychological adaptations to tweak them in the service of sustainability.

For example, we can use such knowledge to manipulate our own perceptions of status so that we actually compete to reduce our consumption of finite resources, such that we compete to "keep down with the Joneses."

Psychologist Robert Cialdini has investigated the use of "psychological illusions" to persuade people to do things they otherwise might be disinclined to do. Here is one description of Cialdini's approach (from: "Finding the 'Weapons' of Persuasion to Save Energy"):

In one San Diego suburb, Cialdini's team went door to door, ringing the doorknobs with signs about energy conservation. There were four types of signs, and each home received one randomly, every week, ...for a month. The first sign urged the homeowner to save energy for the environment's sake; the second said to do it for future generations' benefit. The third sign pointed to the cash savings that would come from conservation. The fourth sign featured Cialdini's trick: "The majority of your neighbors are undertaking energy saving actions every day." ...(Cialdini also) decided to target the below-average energy users with a special message. "When we sent them the message saying you're doing better than your neighbors, we put a smiley face emoticon next to their score," he said. "And that kept them down below what any of their neighbors were doing."

Note how this psychological manipulation helped to redefine high status to "keeping down with the Joneses."

In addition, women may have a special role to play to promote sustainability. Women need to be prepped to find "ecological men" of limited resource consumption really, really sexy. Unfortunately, sexual selection has designed women to tend to prefer "alpha males" -- high status, high consumption, high resource control men (in ancestral times, they helped women's children survive and thrive). Men are adapted to do their best to give women what they want, or face reproductive oblivion. One way that today's men have demonstrated their high status has been to drive big sport utility vehicles (SUVs). However, what if women's psychological adaptations were manipulated (with collective consent) such that they found the guy behind the wheel of an electric car, electric scooter, or, better yet, a bicycle, irresistible? And, what if women sexually rejected the guy driving a big, gas-guzzling SUV?

Our natural tendencies toward nepotism and favoritism also militate against solving the ecological tragedy of the commons. Evolutionary psychology suggests that, when it comes to sharing valuable resources, especially those that are depleting, we will tend to be most altruistic to close genetic kin (inclusive fitness). We may play nice with non-kin if we have established an on-going, mutually beneficial reciprocal relationship (reciprocity). On the negative side, when the above conditions are not met, evolutionary psychology suggests that we will tend to act selfishly. We may even be spiteful (hurt others even at a cost to self) to reduce the relative inclusive fitness of others, especially when competition is increasing because the overall resource pie is shrinking.

But evolutionary psychology also suggests that we might cooperate with people that we identify as part of our "tribe" (strong reciprocity). This feature of human nature may be one of the keys to our ecological survival. Today, the capacity to be altruistic to in-group strangers may result from a serendipitous generalization (or "mismatch") between ancestral tribal living and today's large societies that entail many single interactions with anonymous strangers. Due to this mismatch, we may be fooled into thinking members of our society are part of our "tribe." Result: strong reciprocity -- acting like a "good Samaritan," cognitive concepts of justice, ethics and human rights, and a willingness to conserve finite depleting resources.

However, such strong reciprocity is more likely to occur in a "positive sum game," when the entire resource pie is growing. An individual simply has to cooperate with social rules to expect a progressively larger slice of the pie in the future. So strong reciprocity works well when the overall resource pie is growing (in a "positive sum game"). But, the world-wide depletion of finite resources is a "shrinking pie" situation (a "negative sum game"). Sustainable management of limited Earth resources requires that the whole world cooperate as these resources dwindle.

Such cooperation may be encouraged by using virtual reality to manipulate our psychological adaptations. Today we can enjoy films, TV, and photos precisely because they were not part of our ancestral environment. We have no adaptations to counter these novel tricks - at some unconscious psychological levels we cannot distinguish between reality and virtual reality.

For example, when we watch a TV sitcom, such as Friends, we are fooled (at least on an emotional level) into thinking the characters really are our friends. We may smile and say hello if we see Jennifer Aniston on the street because virtual reality tricked us into believing that we really are friends.

We cry and laugh at movies, despite the fact that we know what we are watching is just light projected through film, the actors are reciting from a script, and there is a sound guy holding a boom mic standing just out of the frame. Sure, it is sad that the ship sank, but no one on the set actually drowned. Nevertheless, our psychological adaptations are fooled, and we may leave the theater a bit misty.

So just as we can be fooled by perceptual illusions, we can also be fooled (and psychologically manipulated) by virtual reality illusions. By mutual consent, we could use virtual reality to intentionally trick ourselves into perceiving that everyone on the planet is a member of our "tribe," that the Earth is our tribal territory that needs to be defended and protected, and that we need to conserve and fairly share finite resources.

For example, we could collectively consent to allow Public Service Announcements (PSAs) - virtual reality media advertisements -- to tweak our psychological adaptations. PSAs have been effective to reduce other self-destructive behaviors, such as smoking. PSAs could help to develop a strong social narrative of mutual cooperation and sustainability on a finite planet.

Needed: A sustainability movement

A new social movement is needed - a sustainability movement. This is particularly important for anyone who plans to live in the future. A grass-roots movement of the magnitude of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and the women's rights movement of the 1970s, is needed. Today no one wants to be called a racist or a sexist (but being called a "consumerist" does not yet sting). Those movements had clearly defined out-groups to vilify as the "enemy" -- and that may have helped to mobilize and motivate activists.

But who is the enemy now? There is no out-group. The enemy is us. We are fighting against ourselves -- our base psychological adaptations to compete for relative status, mates and resources. Evolutionary psychology can help by identifying which of our "psychological buttons" might be manipulated to promote sustainability. But we must collectively agree to manipulate our psychological adaptations to attempt to "transcend" our self-ecocidal nature. If we succeed, there may be a glimmer of hope of mitigating our own ecological overshoot, and the potential Malthusian nightmares of the future.

For an expanded exploration of these topics, with a particular emphasis on energy depletion, see my webpage:

The good news is that birthrate in well-off societies is below-replacement, the bad news is that the birthrate in the struggling societies is well above the replacment hence the population of Yemen should overtake Russia's in the mid-21st century. In other words, does this mean there's a shift in the human population where those who are most likely to cause a Malthusian catastrophe are the ones making up more and more of the population hence guaranteeing catastrophe?

'We should not ignore ecological problems by assuming "someone else" will take care of it, or that "the free market" or "technological breakthroughs" will always come to the rescue in time.'

I don't think you understand the free-market argument. You seem to paint free-marketers as unwilling to change their behavior - sticking their collective heads in the sand until some miracle breakthrough occurs.

The free market relies on the price mechanism to capture and reflect the relative scarcities of resources. As one resource becomes scarce, price increases follow in a free market. In your example, as oil fields "dry up," prices at the pump rise to reflect this growing scarcity.

Your argument seems to be that as supplies this particular resource dwindles, people compete more fervently for it, accelerating the resource depletion. This is not the case in a free market.

In the free market, the new higher prices DO cause a change in behavior - there is REDUCED demand. We saw that in 2008 when gas prices doubled over a matter of months. People changed their behavior and consumed less.

The rising of oil prices has two other effects. First, it makes alternative fuel sources more attractive and economically competitive. Second, it creates an incentive to pursue oil fields that might lie even deeper below the Earth's surface. It may not make sense to invest $60 to recover a barrel of oil that sells for $40 on the market - but it DOES make economic sense to invest that $60 if the price of a barrel of oil climbs to $80 on the market.

In contrast to classical economics, where the services provided by nature are "externalities" and all resources are either viewed as replaceable by another or seen as virtually infinite, ecological economics does not share these starting assumptions.

Two specific points:

As of now, there are no alternative energy sources that can replace oil in terms of energy density, and scale up in the time available.

Sometimes free markets are "near sighted" and do not react in time to anticipate resource depletion problems, and to avoid a difficult period of transition. Dr. Robert Hirsch, in a study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy titled "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management" concluded that to avoid serious impacts, a peak oil mitigation crash program must start 20 years before peak oil. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report

I would argue that oil is a commodity that falls under the classical economics domain, not ecological. Oil occurs naturally, but it is not a "resource" by nature. It is only a "resource" in that human ingenuity tapped into oil's potential energy through the internal combustion engine. In fact, everything that makes oil a resource (it use in plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc.) was born out of ingenuity.

I agree with your first point, that oil is by far the densest form of energy available. We'd see more electric cars on the road if that weren't true.

I disagree about a pending crash. Peak Oil has been a concern since the 1870s; the catastrophe is always 5 years away. This is in part because estimates for recoverable oil are always based on price expectations. Many more reserves are "recoverable" when prices are high, and companies can justify the extra investment to recover that oil.

I could go on, but to put it succinctly: if you're long on oil, you're short on ingenuity.

"The risk is asymmetric: starting a crash program toward replacement of finite fossil fuels too early has great up-sides and marginal downsides (opportunity cost); but failure to act has enormous downside for marginal upside.

We tend to have self-confidence in our ability to solve any problem. But we have no historical analog to the peak of fossil fuels, without a clear (and superior) replacement on the horizon. ...Our moment in history is rather special. It is dangerous to assume that we’ll gracefully handle problems at this scale... It bothers me that we don’t have a plan. It scares me that we (collectively) don’t think we even need a plan. Faith in the market to solve the problem represents a high-stakes gamble. We can and should do better."

-- Tom Murphy, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego.
from Peak Oil: Why We Need a Plan Now
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Peak-Oil-Why-We-need-to-Plan-Now.html

Does no one else see the problem with "collective consent" forced upon the group for the "greater good?" Who chooses what is the "greater good?" What if I don't agree? Then what? You are getting dangerously close to Cass Sunstein's Nudge and his idea of "choice architecture."

Is there a population problem? Yes. Big time. But using EP to justify population control, resource politicization, or other social movements is wrong. That is not the role of science. If you want to be a politician, go do that.

This is one of the things that drives people away from EP. "Tricks" that are used to manipulate people's thoughts and motivators and change evolutionary adaptations to fit a particular agenda. If you ever want EP to become more mainstream in the social sciences (like I do) then stay away from terms like "tricks" and "collective consent" and other mind control metaphors. EP is not the study of how to manipulate people.

Advertisers are now using psychological tricks (and not just EP ones) without our consent.

However, if we can agree on a goal that is difficult but worthwhile, and with mutual consent, we can work to change undesirable behaviors by using such "tricks."

An excellent example of this was the use of anti-smoking public service announcements (PSAs) to help reduce the the rates of smoking. That was a very successful example of PSAs used by "mutual consent."

Getting folks to agree that there is a problem is the first step. And, a difficult one, even when the scientific evidence that a serious problem exists is overwhelming (e.g., the "smoking is healthy" physicians in the past, and, now climate change deniers).

Generally, I would agree with the tricks that advertisers use. Nike is good at using attractive men and women to show you how attractive you could be if you wore their shoes.

But I take issue with the smoking example. I doubt that smokers would agree that smoking is wrong and would argue that the "mutual consent" was taking away their right to do what they wanted. The slippery slope towards regulating what people can and cannot do is getting steeper.

An evolutionary adaptation for sugar consumption has led, in part, to the obesity epidemic. Now that adaptation has become a mal-adaptation that is killing us. But if a person wants to eat Twinkies, its not my place to tell them no, just like its not my place to pay for their health care.

I think reflection is always 20/20, especially seeing problems in your rear-view mirror, such as with Easter Island. Humans, as you know, are short-term thinkers as opposed to long-term planners. We act in our best interest, usually, and for the good of the group when it suits us.

The problem set I completely agree with you; there must be a long-term solution to the population issue. Carying capacity has already been reached according to some, and science is a crutch and a fall-back option when it comes to solving complex problems. Using an evolutionary solution, whatever that may be, may be more effective in curbing growth.

Stopping procreation is hard; stopping technologically and scientifically extending our natural life span is easy. Get rid of modern societal crutches to keep us alive and the population will level out quickly. Just my two cents...

I guess the US government disagrees with your position "just like its not my place to pay for their health care". As of 2010, taxpayers are forced to pay for subsidies for mandatory "Affordable" Care Act health insurance. In 2016 the taxpayers paid more than 80 billion dollars to subsidize the health insurance of others under the "Affordable" Care Act.

I've also been having PR problems when talking to people about the population crisis. It seems that every USAmerican is born to believe that they will get married and have 3 kids, 2 cars and a house. They might not be able to afford the cars or the house, but they sure as sh!t can afford to pop those babies out. 'Cause babies don't cost anything do they?

There are a few points that I have been proposing recently:

Encouragement of homosexuality: Quite obvious I believe, if there is no sperm and egg, there is no baby. The mass media has been doing very well promoting this, and many teens who aren't even oriented towards their own sex are trying this lifestyle out to seem hip. The downside is females are using in-vitro to produce their children, and we all know the side effects of that.

Encouragement of abortion: If you don't want a child, and can't take care of it, why release it to the world? It has been shown that children born into poverty or poor households have higher incidence of mental disease. Do we really want to inflict pain on them and the rest of society?

Recycling of human meat: Since people seem to be addicted to eating meat, it seems we could potentially alleviate the hunger problem in the future by recycling dead humans as food. This is definitely less popular, but as someone who has worked as a mortuary, I can tell you that a great deal of viable food goes to waste. Seeing that animals consume such a great deal of resources, it seems foolish not to take advantage of food that raises itself. Not to say that humans should be viewed as food, but there's always potential.

If Soylent Green looked no worse than in the movie, and tasted good, people would eat it.
I've heard the actors in that film ate saltines smeared with peanut butter, both dyed green with food coloring. And yet they still had difficulty, because of what it symbolized in the story. "It's people!"

If Soylent Green looked no worse than in the movie, and tasted good, people would eat it.
I've heard the actors in that film ate saltines smeared with peanut butter, both dyed green with food coloring. And yet they still had difficulty, because of what it symbolized in the story. "It's people!"

The blogger has not heard of the global 'demographic transition': the decline in fertility in virtually every country in the world, which is projected to lead to a peak in global population by 2050 followed by a steep fall.
Demographers -- not least those working from an evolutionary perspective -- have made ever more complex models, none of which fit the data.
Nobody is working on an obvious biological candidate re stress.
Cortisol-based stress-response mechanisms lead to reproductive-suppression, so what demographers should be looking for is a stressor common across developed and un-developed, and urban and rural societies.
What may be promising is the poorly researched (and this was a long time ago) 'crowding stress' causing the 'General Adaptive Syndrome': a sharp population crash. This is adaptive to ward off local extinction through over-exploitation of the local ecology.
We know from mammalian so-called 'plague mode' episodes that this often overshoots to actually cause the local extinction the mechanism supposedly functions to avoid; but as long as statistically GAS saved more local populations than would otherwise have gone to the wall anyway, then the genetic underpinning of the phenomenon would have been selected.
It is thought that there is a particular stress experienced when crowding is by close proximity to NON-kin. This is just what is common across the world today.
So why is nobody studying this distinct possibility to explain the 'demographic transition'?
It may be through profound ignorance of selection models: an assumption that GAS could evolve only through an untenable 'group selection' model. But this is false. Lineage-selection would be responsible. [The same objection could be made to the phenomenon of dominance hierarchy -- that is, the neural mechanisms in individuals that a necessary to produce the self-organising phenomenon of a dominance-hierarchy. Just as with fertility decline, low dominance is hardly in the interests of an individual; but lineage-selection explains why this is not a problem.]

My point here is that species, including humans, have no psychological adaptations to prevent ecological overshoot and subsequent population crash. It is too rare of an historical event to produce such an adaptation. And, the time lag between overpopulation and the subsequent effects also militates against the evolution such an adaptation(s).

There are most likely general adaptations to forgo reproduction when times are tough (starvation, overcrowding with non-kin, etc.), but I would claim that these evolved in less extreme, more frequently encountered non-overshoot/collapse scenarios. In contrast, a general overshoot situation (such as the reindeer on St. Mathew Island) is a sudden, massive event.

I don't think the human demographic transition is due to the operation of population control adaptations (group selection), but is likely due to either byproducts of other adaptations (don't get pregnant if you are starving, etc.), or due to ancestral-current mismatch leading to the "mis-firing" of adaptations not specifically designed to avoid ecological overshoot.

I agree that any adaptation to prevent population overshoot wouldn't be a product of 'group selection'. As I pointed out, it would be through lineage-selection, which is not selection across level but across time-scale in the context of the whole reproductive group [See Nunney].
I don't think that the 'General Adaptation Syndrome' can be ruled out, because it is but an extension of general differential reproductive-suppression mechanism, which potentially would get round your point about the relative rarity of population overshoot.
My point is that it is a strong candidate and should be researched at least in order to rule it out; not that you aren't quite possibly right that the phenomenon is due to "by-products" of adaptation rather than an adaptation per se.
Cheers
Steve Moxon

Well, it seems that the biological basis of the 'demographic transition' has been found.
Here's the ScienceDaily digest of a paper by Larry Faig published a couple of months ago, followed by the abstract .....
MALE MICE EXPOSED TO CHRONIC STRESS HAVE ANXIOUS FEMALE OFFSPRING
ScienceDaily (Aug. 22, 2012) — A study in mice conducted by researchers at Tufts University School of Medicine suggests that a woman's risk of anxiety and dysfunctional social behavior may depend on the experiences of her parents, particularly fathers, when they were young.
The study, published online in Biological Psychiatry, suggests that stress caused by chronic social instability during youth contributes to epigenetic changes in sperm cells that can lead to psychiatric disorders in female offspring across multiple generations.
"The long-term effects of stress can be pernicious. We first found that adolescent mice exposed to chronic social instability, where the cage composition of mice is constantly changing, exhibited anxious behavior and poor social interactions through adulthood. These changes were especially prominent in female mice," said first author Lorena Saavedra-Rodríguez, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow in the Larry Feig laboratory at Tufts University School of Medicine.
The researchers then studied the offspring of these previously-stressed mice and observed that again female, but not male, offspring exhibited elevated anxiety and poor social interactions. Notably, even though the stressed males did not express any of these altered behaviors, they passed on these behaviors to their female offspring after being mated to non-stressed females. Moreover, the male offspring passed on these behaviors to yet another generation of female offspring.
"We are presently searching for biochemical changes in the sperm of stressed fathers that could account for this newly appreciated form of inheritance" said senior author Larry A. Feig, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry at Tufts University School of Medicine and member of the biochemistry and neuroscience program faculties at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University. "Hopefully, this work will stimulate efforts to determine whether similar phenomena occur in humans."

Lorena Saavedra-Rodríguez, Larry A. Feig. Chronic Social Instability Induces Anxiety and Defective Social Interactions Across Generations. Biological Psychiatry, 2012
Abstract
BACKGROUND:
Chronic social instability during adolescence and early adulthood is known to produce a variety of long-lasting effects that may contribute to future psychiatric disorders. However, its potential to affect future generations has not been tested.
METHODS:
Female and male mice were exposed to chronic social stress involving social instability and disruption of social hierarchy from postnatal day 27 to 76. After treatment, a group of animals was used to evaluate long-term behavioral effects of the stress exposure, and other mice were used to generate F1, F2, and F3 offspring, to test for behavioral effects across generations.
RESULTS:
Chronic social instability during adolescence and early adulthood induces persistent behavioral alterations, including enhanced anxiety and social deficits that are transmitted predominantly to females across at least three generations. Both mothers and fathers can transmit all of these altered behaviors to their F1 offspring. However, only F1 fathers transmit all of them to their F2 and F3 daughters. In the F1 generation, enhanced anxiety and social deficits are associated with elevated serum corticosterone levels; however, in the F2 and F3 generations, they are not.
CONCLUSIONS:
These findings support the idea that individual risk for psychiatric disorders that involve enhanced anxiety and/or social dysfunction may be dependent not only on the specific alleles of genes that are inherited from one's parents and on one's own experiences, but also on the experiences of one's parents when they were young.

The strategy of deliberately replacing the populations of Majority-White countries with foreigners whose "religion" allows them to rape and murder "infidels" and breed large polygamous families on welfare may not have been liberals' brightest idea after all.